Confessor

by John Gardner

  “And then?” Khami asked.

  “And then we go our separate ways and finally return home.”

  At the Willard, Herbie was putting his point of view to the rest of the Conductor team. There were five agents present, apart from Kruger and Bex: Hatch and Christie from the FBI; a pair of gray suits from Langley, one introduced as Cork Smith, the other referred to only as Krysak—a cuddly-looking man built like a fireplug but with clear, very light blue eyes, which looked as though they had been sculpted from ice. Also in attendance was another woman, Sheila FitzGerald, from the Secret Service—tall, slender and very fit: a woman who moved like a panther and had claimed, at the start of the meeting, that the Secret Service owned the streets around the White House and the Capitol.

  “You’re all here to round up these pretty dangerous clowns,” Herbie began, looking a little flushed. “I am only here because these terrorists seem to have wandered into the path of our investigation.” He touched Bex’s shoulder to link her to himself. “I’m only interested in the Intiqam people if they happen to have murdered my former colleague, Gus Keene. Bex is here for the same reason. We think we now know who blew my old friend into the wide blue yonder, and it isn’t your set of Iraqi hoodlums. By rights, we’re out of this as from now.”

  “You squeamish about terrorists?” Christie looked hard at Herbie and then switched to Bex. The mocking look on her face seemed to be a permanent feature, not a look assumed simply for them.

  “Squeamish?” Kruger’s voice went up an octave, and his color changed noticeably, “Young woman, you call me squeamish? I’ve dealt with bringers of terror for nearly my whole life. Put this lot next to real terrorists and they come out like the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Sure, they’ve killed, they managed to plant bombs, but they’ve slowly been hived off. They’ve either got themselves killed or caught.” He paused for a deep breath, as though trying to control his anger. Then: “I would suggest you get yourselves out on the streets, search among the crowds, look in every nook and cranny, then put them out of their misery altogether. DCI Olesker and I have a different agenda. What I’m telling you is that there is only a very tenuous link between our job and your terrorists.” He grinned at Bex and quietly said, “Tenuous is good, yes?”

  “Brilliant, Herb.” She winked at him.

  Hatch got to his feet, paced the floor for a couple of minutes, then said they could not just walk out on Conductor. “You’re under discipline.”

  “Been under discipline nearly all my life, Dick.” Herb smiled up at him. “But this time you’re wrong. I’m retired and I’m only being paid out-of-pocket expenses. I’m on this job to find out one thing, and I think it’s within reach. Bex is also here for the same reason. Our job is to catch a killer, or killers, who I honestly don’t think are connected with Intiqam.”

  “So the Brits are opting out?” Christie’s face showed open disgust.

  “You want to put it that way, okay.” Herb turned to Cork Smith from Langley. “If I were you, I’d get on to your opposite number at Vauxhall Cross. If you still want us on your team, the SIS will have to give it a big thumbs-up, but they’ll qualify that. In the end, they’ll tell you okay, but they’ll also tell you that, should we come across a direct link to our real case, it’ll have to take precedence. Sure, maybe these Vengeance people have got the key to the case we’re here to crack”—again he touched Bex’s arm to include her—“but I for one am opting out of your form of discipline.”

  “We can always close you down. Take you off to Dulles and put you on a flight to Heathrow, persona non grata.” Smith, if that was indeed his real name, appeared to be serious.

  “Why not?” Kruger seemed perfectly happy with the idea. “If that’s what you really want. But I think you might get yourself overruled.” As he spoke, he noticed Krysak slip quietly from the room.

  “Your friend’s gone to get a ruling?” Kruger asked brightly. “We’ll abide by whatever answer he gets.” He tilted his head towards the main bedroom, then rose and walked to the door. Bex followed him.

  “What the hell’s all this about, Herb? We need the cooperation of these guys.”

  “Sure we need it, but I want to be one hundred percent certain that we can fold up our tents and leave here on Thursday. Look, Bex, trust me on this. I think we can wrap up our case here in D.C. over the coming weekend. But we won’t do it if we’re tied to the American agencies. Yes, we’ll stay with them, trying to flush out this trio of Iraqis, but only until Thursday. On Thursday we have to be able to opt out, with no questions asked.”

  “You talking about this magic conference, or whatever it is?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Herb, why would we want to hang around people doing card tricks?” Her right eyebrow lifted in a sign of doubt which spoke volumes.

  “Bex, I know you don’t like it. You’re one of those people who hate to be fooled by magicians. I think I should call you Witch Finder General. Your whole mind-set is one that says, ‘These guys are frauds. They deceive; they pretend to overcome laws of nature, but I don’ go for that. I want to know how they do it and I’m buggered if it’s going to impress me.’”

  “I am buggered if it’s going to impress me.”

  “You mean that last video we saw—Gus doing his lecture about the theory of intelligence gathering running parallel to the theory of the performing art of magic—you truly can say that didn’t impress you?”

  “It was very clever in its way, but …Oh, Herb, I can’t help it. I know what they do is impossible—I’m talking about the good ones—but I know it’s a cheat, a swindle. For me, magicians are licensed to lie, to defraud in the name of some supposed performing art, and I just don’t go for it.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to go for it at the weekend, sweetie, because that’s where I think we’ll find the truth about Gus and his death.”

  “What did you call me?” There was no hostility in her voice or manner.

  “I call you sweetie. Is not good, Bex, then I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Nobody’s called me ‘sweetie’ for a very long time. I’m just not the type to be called ‘sweetie.’”

  “To me you’re certainly the type.”

  “Oh.”

  It was over an hour before someone knocked on the door.

  “We’d like you to come back into the meeting, if you don’t mind.” Cork Smith appeared slightly ruffled.

  “I talked with your people in London.” Krysak held the floor; everyone else sat around. Christie was lying down, one elbow on the carpet, with the hand supporting her head. “They’d like a word with you when you have a minute.” Krysak spoke fast, in quick machine-gun-like bursts. “To put it all in perspective, they’re anxious that you assist us with the Intiqam business. We would like that. In return, they’ve asked us to take you at your word. When you tell us you have some direct lead in your own case, they want us to let you go.”

  “So, what you tell them, Mr. …?”

  “Charlie.” Krysak gave Herbie an amiable smile.

  “So, what you tell them, Charlie?”

  “We’ve agreed. So, will you stay on our op for the time being?”

  “Sure.” Herbie looked at DCI Olesker, who nodded. “Sure, but I should warn you that we’re pretty close to moving in on the answer to our case.”

  “Okay.” Smith took over. “Charlie here says you’ve been authorized to carry.” He produced two Beretta 9mm automatics and six extra magazines.

  Herbie grinned, scooping one of the pistols from the table, checking it before slipping it into his waistband, behind the right hip.

  Bex looked dubious. “I hate guns,” she said.

  “Take it, Bex.”

  “Where’m I going to carry it? In my knickers?”

  “Knickers is Brit for panties,” the Secret Service lady translated.

  There were some uneasy laughs.

  “Up to you, Bex.” Herbie gave her one of his surprised looks. “Keep it whe
re you like. Only the Shadow knows.” He looked around the room. “So, we going to sweep the streets looking for these bozos? They may be stupid, but we’re obviously not up to scratch—any of us. We lose Carole. Then we find her again. Everyone now loses the damned Iraqis, and what we get out of it? Damned great wad of Semtex up the arse if you ask me.”

  “Herb, I—” Bex began.

  “Sorry, but I am righteously mad. Gus gets killed and we end up in the middle of a cockeyed, badly handled, stupid, death-dealing terrorist operation. In one word, I’m fucking fed up.”

  “That’s four words, Herb.”

  “Who’s fucking counting? I want to get my big hands on these people. See them blown away for a change, but my guts tell me something really bad is going down.”

  They decided that they should not go out to eat together. “One at a time,” Walid suggested.

  “I bought eggs and things,” Khami offered. “I can cook for us.”

  “I think I’ll go out. Need to get off by myself.” Hisham managed to sound composed.

  “Okay.” Walid seemed very happy to be left on his own with Khami. “Don’t take more than an hour or so. We have to start making up the bombs tonight if we’re really going to see this through.”

  Hisham walked down to Au Pied de Cochon, where he ate well, and thought again about making a run for it. Life, at the moment, was like a juggler keeping six chain saws in the air at once without losing an arm.

  He probably would have been more concerned if he had known that he was sitting in a restaurant that, in the mid-1980s, had been the scene of an unfortunate end run by a KGB defector. It was in Au Pied de Cochon where he had dined with his CIA minders and then, in the middle of dinner, calmly walked out and back to the Soviet Embassy, returning to his old masters.

  Hisham did not know this, so was spared further anguish. After the meal he took a turn around the block, found a telephone and used a credit card to make yet another call. Hisham Silwani had ceased being rational regarding which side he was working for. His only thought was to save his own skin. This latest call was to Belfast. He spoke for only a minute, but what he told the people at the other end was flashed to Declan Norton in London. Had Hisham been arrested at this point, he truly would have no good reason or logic to explain any of his recent actions.

  The following morning Declan Norton, accompanied by Sean O’Donnel, left Heathrow on a direct flight to Washington, Dulles. They carried British passports under the names of David Scaif and Frank Meadows. Declan had left Fergus behind in London. He felt the man did not have the stomach for what he was about to do. Later the same day, another familiar figure came into Washington National. He had traveled from London via New York. By the time they all reached D.C., the bombs had begun to explode.

  28

  THE FIRST TWO BOMBS EXPLODED within minutes of one another around noon the next day. Both were horrific, large and planted to kill, maim and anger. The first detonated in the main concourse of the recently refurbished Union Station at a minute to noon and was heard over ten miles away.

  Later, it was established that the Union Station bomb was, in effect, two bombs linked together by an umbilical cord of wire: one in the upper concourse, the other below in the train-boarding area. Just as it was finally discovered that the four tons of C-4 explosive, two for each bomb, had been brought into D.C. months before by articulated truck from Canada. They were even able to pinpoint that the plastique had been brought into Halifax by a container ship from Germany, and from there by truck to D.C.

  The station was crowded and sections of the building were ripped away as though some magic process had turned the steel, concrete and brick into paper. Some maintained that the fire and blast rolled straight out of the main façade. Part of the roof was thrown clear, fires started, two railway engines were lifted from their tracks and one entire train, loaded and about to leave, was gutted by a fireball.

  Most of those killed or maimed were either waiting for their trains to leave or walking around the main concourse. Uncontrolled explosions are not predictable. The Union Station bomb had its fair number of strange incidents. As the smoke, flames and debris cleared from the façade directly behind Columbus Circle, a woman, stripped naked of her clothing, walked out of the wreckage. When the emergency squads arrived, she was found to be completely unharmed.

  In the train which was consumed by a fireball, a man and two women were thrown clear. They were the only people who lived in that part of the incident. All three had their hair and eyebrows singed, and one was deaf for a week.

  Of the people caught on the main concourse, only two small children escaped serious injury. Two little boys aged five and seven were lifted into the air and fell some sixty feet from where they had been standing with their parents. They survived. Their parents, like so many others on that horrific morning, were never found. Whole families were turned into odd bones, pieces of flesh and clothing. It was impossible to put names to the jigsaw of body parts.

  At one minute past noon the second device exploded, right behind Daniel Chester French’s huge and inspiring white marble statue of Abraham Lincoln set within the templelike Memorial at the southern end of the Reflecting Pool—the crowning glory of the magnificent park scape of the Mall.

  The noise, to some, seemed like an echo from the explosion at Union Station. The Lincoln statue simply appeared to disintegrate in a ball of flame, sending large chunks of marble arcing in different directions. Smaller pieces flew like shrapnel, cutting people off the steps of the Memorial as though they were mown down by a hail of bullets. Lincoln’s head leaped up from the fire, hit the roof, yet stayed intact as it ricocheted down the steps and smashed into three Japanese tourists who were setting up a complex video camera between the steps and the Reflecting Pool. All three were hurled backwards and pulped by the giant football of a head.

  The blast from this bomb also did strange things; it seemed to funnel its way out of the Memorial, sending flames and blast waves forward, as though some invisible force had flashed down the steps, across the grass and onto the Reflecting Pool, where it caused what was almost a tidal wave, which ran the length of the water, rising into a breaker that broke like surf at the Washington Monument.

  A professional photographer had been taking a panoramic view of the Reflecting Pool at the moment of detonation. It was a photograph that sold to Time for a large, undisclosed sum, for it made the pool look as though some inhuman phenomenon had shattered the water into a million pieces, all blood red from the flames of the explosion.

  In all, the two bombs claimed four hundred lives, and injured another three hundred persons. On that day alone, Washington, D.C., had been turned into a charnel house.

  At ten past noon Jasmine spoke with Claudius.

  “I can’t stop it,” Jasmine said.

  “Will there be more?”

  “I think many more, and something truly horrible at the end.”

  “You’ve mentioned that. Can I help to stop it?”

  “I don’t know,” Jasmine replied. “Maybe, but I dare not do anything yet.”

  “Jump, then. Jump now. You know how to find me.” By the time Claudius said this, Jasmine had already closed the line.

  Throughout the country the news first numbed people, then the shock turned to outrage. The two bombs tied up rescue squads, ambulances and police well into the early hours of the evening.

  The President went on television and called for calm both in the city and outside. The FBI, together with the police, issued a joint statement: they were basically of the opinion that the terrorists who had committed this appalling act were probably already out of the country.

  As the news spread quickly around the world, messages of condolence, anger and solidarity poured into the city. The British Prime Minister, never one to miss an opportunity, offered specialist aid, saying that the United Kingdom had suffered outrages such as this in the past and could provide expert technicians to help track down those who had unleashed the dogs of
terrorist war upon the United States. His offer was politely declined, and in private many politicians in D.C. saw a snub behind the PM’s offer. “Quoting Shakespeare doesn’t make him into Churchill,” the President said with no a little anger.

  Late in the afternoon, Worboys put in a secure telephone call to Herbie Kruger.

  “Don’t want to get you worried, Herb,” he began, “but I’ve just seen an interesting document from the Security Service. Well, not so much a document as a tape.” For some time now, unknown to most people, banks of video machines that regularly scanned incoming and outgoing passengers had been installed by the Security Service, in conjunction with the airlines who used Heathrow most frequently.

  These tapes were checked out in three-hour segments, though there were times when the three hours overran into four or even five. One of the tapes, being viewed by men and women who were current with criminal and terrorist “faces,” had brought in positive ID. Two men, well known to MI5, had boarded the British Airways morning flight to Washington, D.C.

  “People we know as well,” Worboys told an anxious Kruger. “Declan Norton and Sean O’Donnel.”

  Herbie scowled, then asked, “We’re talking about the Declan Norton who was shopped by Ishmael—the Iraqi Gus ran through Five?”

  “That’s the one. We didn’t get the info until well after the flight landed at Dulles; otherwise, we’d have had them pulled by the Yanks.”

  “What’re you suggesting, Young Worboys?”

  “Well, we had the word from Ishmael. You saw the file. Norton was the FFIRA man who asked the Intiqam team to do them a favor. The favor was Gus, The Whizzer, myself and you, Herb. All of us on a plate, served up with apples in our mouths and garnished just the way they like it.”

  Herbie spoke as though to himself. “And they got The Whizzer, had a couple of goes at you, twice at me, and Gus was dead long before that particular contract went out.”

  “You think it’s the last few Intiqam people responsible for today’s carnage?”